Inside/Outside: Considerations for Teaching Artists

This workshop equips teaching artists to engage thoughtfully and responsibly in carceral settings by grounding their practice in critical ethical frameworks, trauma-informed and healing-centered methodologies, and deeply relational approaches to arts-making. Moving beyond technical instruction, the workshop invites participants to examine power, consent, agency, and accountability in environments shaped by surveillance, coercion, and structural violence. Through dialogue, case studies, and embodied exercises, artists will reflect on their positionality and develop practices that prioritize dignity, care, and mutual transformation. Participants will also receive practical tools for navigating the institutional realities of carceral spaces, including understanding security protocols, establishing collaborative relationships with correctional staff and community partners, designing adaptable curricula, and planning for long-term sustainability. Attention will be given to maintaining ethical boundaries, responding to trauma in ways that avoid re-harm, and cultivating creative processes that honor participants’ lived experiences without instrumentalizing them. Centering radical imagination as a form of resistance and possibility, the workshop positions arts engagement not as charity, but as a site of solidarity, critical inquiry, and collective meaning-making. Teaching artists will leave with concrete strategies, reflective frameworks, and a renewed commitment to fostering artistic spaces that affirm humanity within and beyond carceral institutions.

Dr. André de Quadros is a professor of music at Boston University whose work is centrally engaged with incarceration, prison education, and the global carceral state. With affiliations spanning African, African American & Black Diaspora, American, Asian, Jewish, and Muslim Studies, as well as Forced Migration, his scholarship and artistic practice examine the intersections of race, mass incarceration, state violence, and human rights. As an artist, scholar, poet, and activist, he has led sustained music initiatives in prisons and detention centers across multiple countries, working alongside incarcerated people, individuals in psychosocial rehabilitation, refugees, and survivors of torture and sexual violence. His carceral work foregrounds music-making as a site of dignity, resistance, and collective transformation, challenging punitive logics and advancing abolitionist imaginaries. He directs choirs and choral projects in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the United States, Israel and the Arab world, and along the Mexico–US border, often in contexts shaped by confinement and displacement. He is the author or editor of eight books and numerous scholarly publications and choral editions. In 2019, he was a Distinguished Academic Visitor at the University of Cambridge, and he has received many honors, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Melbourne.